CIE Advisory Board Profile

George SollmanFounder and ChairmanArabesque Investments, LLC

George Sollman is the Chairman and Founder of Arabesque Investments LLC, Atherton, CA, a firm focused on investments in early stage high tech startups since mid-2000.

He was the former president co-founder & CEO of @Motion Inc., acquired by Phone.com, now OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV) in 2000. Initially funded in 1997, @Motion was a venture-backed startup, pioneering, developing, and marketing Internet voice portal servers. In addition to lead venture backing by DCM (Doll Capital Management), the company’s investors also included T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) and Intel Ventures.

Before founding @Motion, Mr. Sollman was the president and CEO of Centigram Communications Corporation (San Jose, CA) from 1985 through 1997, a leading voice messaging company. During this time, the company grew from a venture-backed, privately held firm of about $1M in revenues to a publicly-held company with its IPO in October 1991, with revenues that grew to more than $120M. ADC Telecom subsequently acquired the company in 2000.

Before joining Centigram, Mr. Sollman was part of the executive management of Shugart Corporation, a leading disk drive company in the period 1976-84. During this time, the company grew from about $6M to $240M, during which time it was acquired by Xerox Corporation.

Mr. Sollman is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of venture-backed privately held Corticon Technologies (San Mateo, CA). Previously, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of publicly held First Virtual Communications (acquired by RADvision in 2005), on the Board of Directors of venture-backed private companies CEON Corporation (acquired by Convergys in 2008), Zack Systems (San Mateo, CA), and Metacode Corporation (acquired by Interwoven in 2000). He was also on the Board of Directors of T-Ventures (the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom).

From 1988-1997 Mr. Sollman was active with the American Electronics Association (AEA), where he served on the National Board of Directors. He was elected as the 1996-97 National Chairman of the AEA, representing its 3,200 member companies.

Mr. Sollman presently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA), where he was the Chair from 2001-2004, and also the Advisory Board of the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. He received his BSEE from Northwestern University (1964) and an MSEE from Northeastern University (1967). Subsequently, he received five patents in disk storage technology.